Australia – Impressive, an Australia-based digital marketing agency, has unveiled Skailed, a cutting-edge SEO tool that automates the research and creation of SEO-optimised landing pages, offering businesses a powerful solution to enhance online visibility and drive conversions.
Skailed was conceived by Sam Makwana, Impressive’s head of SEO, who identified the need for a scalable, automated solution after a client requested the rapid creation of hundreds of landing pages. Collaborating with CEO Robert Tadros, Makwana spearheaded the development of the SEO tool over the past year, employing an AGILE-driven approach within Impressive Labs, the in-house R&D arm of Impressive, to bring the idea to life.
The launch of Skailed represents a significant breakthrough in e-commerce, enabling businesses to dramatically increase online traffic, conversions, and revenue through advanced SEO strategies.
Impressive’s Skailed tackles one of the most demanding challenges businesses face—manually creating thousands of targeted SEO landing pages. By automating this process, Skailed enables businesses to boost SEO performance while significantly cutting both time and costs.
The SEO tool can create, optimise, and index hundreds of high-revenue-generating category landing pages in under four hours, directing high-intent shoppers to the most relevant pages based on their search queries. This capability not only drives increased traffic but also exponentially boosts conversion rates, providing businesses with an efficient, scalable solution to grow revenue while gaining a strong competitive edge—without additional spending on paid media.
Skailed is designed as a scalable solution, making it adaptable for businesses of all sizes across diverse industries. With seamless integration to Shopify, it simplifies the enhancement of programmatic SEO strategies, providing a user-friendly tool for businesses aiming to optimise their SEO efforts.
“Many agencies rely on third-party tools to solve complex problems, but we wanted to create a solution tailored to our clients’ unique needs,” Makwana said. “Skailed is a direct response to the challenges our clients face, and its success is driven by continuous iteration based on client feedback and data.”
Impressive’s recognition with the ‘AFR Most Innovative Companies Award’ for Skailed reflects its commitment to tackling complex marketing challenges with advanced technology. Unlike traditional SaaS tools, Skailed was developed by the team that uses it daily, enabling rapid feedback and ongoing enhancements to ensure its effectiveness across various industries.
“Winning the AFR award for Skailed is a testament to the hard work and creativity of our team. We are incredibly proud to be recognised for pushing the boundaries of what digital marketing agencies can achieve through innovation,” Tadros shared.
Skailed has already shown positive results for e-commerce businesses like Space Furniture, The Memo, Mattel, and Scanlan Theodore. Impressive plans to expand the tool’s capabilities to additional CMS platforms while focussing on scalable solutions to meet the evolving demands of the digital landscape.
Sydney, Australia– In addition to its existing remit in Australia, digital marketing agency Tug agency has expanded its partnership with entertainment company and tourist attraction operator Merlin Entertainment to increase the share of voice and audience traffic for all Merlin Entertainments attractions in Australia and New Zealand through free, organic, editorial and natural search results.
Merlin Entertainments, which is a home for tourist attractions, appointed the agency in July last year to manage the search engine optimisation for SEA LIFE Sydney. In the expanded role, the agency will now work on all four SEA LIFE locations in Australia and New Zealand and other attractions including WILDLIFE Sydney Zoo, LEGOLAND Discovery Centre Melbourne, Illawarra Fly Treetop Adventure and Otway Fly Treetop Adventure, Madame Tussauds and Sydney Tower Eye.
Matt Newman, head of e-commerce at Merlin Entertainments for APAC said that Tug agency has been consistently delivering strong performance so they are delighted to expand the agency’s remit for their operations in Australia and New Zealand.
“Merlin Entertainments offers something for everyone and we look forward to engaging more visitors at our attractions and creating more magical experiences for our guests with the help of Tug’s digital marketing expertise,” Newman added.
Charlie Bacon, managing director at Tug Sydney, commented, “Following a successful trial, we welcome the opportunity to extend our specialist search capabilities for all of Merlin Entertainments venues. They operate some of the most unique and memorable visitor attractions and the team is ready to ensure that the business continues to enjoy customer growth.”
Tug agency specialises in performance media, using data, media, content and technology with offices in Sydney, Singapore, London, Toronto and Berlin.
Singapore – Digital marketing agency Tug Singapore has appointed Darran Hong as its newest SEO director, where he will be responsible for leading the agency’s SEO services for its growing portfolio of clients in Southeast Asia.
Hong joins from life insurance company FWD Group as assistant SEO manager. Prior to that, he also served as senior SEO strategist at global performance marketing agency, Performics.
Hong’s new role will include responsibility for managing overall SEO for its clients in the region, helping to drive incremental growth in search to maximise return on marketing investment. This includes planning and managing site technical implementations, while also determining the strategic direction of content campaigns in line with business goals and objectives.
Speaking on his appointment, he said, “Tug’s proposition is built on using data, media, content and technology to full effect and backed by a global network of specialists. I’m delighted to be joining the team in Singapore as the agency builds its presence by delivering a new approach to performance marketing.”
Meanwhile, Karen Soo, who was recently appointed as managing director for Tug Singapore, commented, “We have identified new business opportunities in key categories including software, insurance and finance and Darran’s experience in this space will be invaluable as we embark on growing the Tug agency across the region. He is a strategic thinker who understands how to effectively use digital marketing to leverage brands and deliver results for our clients.”
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – Emerging enterprise SEO developer NexMind has announced that its SEO optimisation and content generation software now supports Arabic language. Available immediately, NexODN for Arabic allows digital marketers to launch keyword searches in Arabic to improve the ranking of websites.
Besides Arabic, NexODN also supports 126 other languages including English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Thai, Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Malaysia, Vietnamese, Russian, and Portuguese.
Meanwhile, its built-in content generation feature lets users generate SEO-driven Arabic content including advertising copy, website headers, blog articles and others. NexODN for Arabic is available on a subscription basis. Subscribers of NexODN for Arabic can utilise all key features which are keyword query, keyword analyzer, keyword tracker, content optimisation, content generation, and meta tags.
Francis Lui, CEO at NexMind said, “We’re excited that we now support Arabic, one of the most popular languages in the world. This milestone helps us expand our reach further to website owners and digital marketers, especially in the Middle East region.”
He added, “NexODN doesn’t just tell where a website is ranked in a search engine, but our technology also makes smart recommendations of Arabic words to improve the ranking. This process helps the website become a more competitive marketing channel critical for business growth.”
Sydney, Australia – Digital marketing agency Tug has been reappointed by Budget Direct Insurance in Singapore and one of its brands EasyCompare in Thailand, with an expansion of its remit to include content and UX.
Budget Direct Insurance is an online digital insurance company and part of an international insurance group providing insurance solutions worldwide. EasyCompare Thailand is one of its brands and is an online car insurance comparison website and broker in Thailand.
Tug was first engaged by the two more than 12 months ago to manage link acquisition and competitor analysis to boost their local search rankings. In addition to extending its initial engagement, Tug will also work on on-page optimization, content strategy, creation, and UX to further grow both brands in each country.
The agency said it will increase site engagement for the two brands by incorporating thought leadership pieces, data-driven content, and infographics to drive overall expertise, authority, and trustworthiness which are key factors for a successful SEO strategy.
Simon Birch, CEO of Budget Direct Insurance, said, “Tug has the capability and experience to deliver effective strategic thinking and implementation of search optimization, more than most in our region. I’m delighted we are not only continuing our relationship with them, but expanding its range of services to ensure Budget Direct Insurance and EasyCompare Thailand continue to be top of mind for consumers.”
Tug’s CEO Nick Beck commented, “Having built a successful partnership with both teams, we’re delighted that our engagement has been extended and expanded. As we continue to grow the Tug network across Southeast Asia, we look forward to establishing an on the ground presence in Singapore and bringing our expertise to more businesses early next year.”
Tug will be managing the business from its Sydney office, with plans to open a regional Southeast Asia hub in Singapore during the first quarter of 2022, joining its network of offices in Toronto, London, and Berlin.
Tug has also recently announced acquiring the SEO mandate of resto booking platform Dish Cult and also an extended remit for software firm LEAP to add global media business.
Hong Kong – HDcourse, the SEO optimization services and training provider, has launched free online SEO courses to help SMEs increase their organic SEO traffic.
HDcourse offers courses that cover SEO, WordPress, email marketing, and digital marketing. It supports short video teaching and is suitable for people who are studying on mobile phones and busy with work.
HDcourse shared a case study where one of its students from Malaysia had only 53,500 impressions and 1,240 clicks on Google, and following its classes, said impressions have grown to 583,000 and clicks to 15,000.
HDcourse said that through the free SEO teaching courses, anyone can have a jumpstart, promoting its classes to have 10 integrated factors that can improve the SEO of the clients and obtain organic traffic.
One of the factors is ‘Search Intention’, that helps businesses to know consumers’ intentions behind inputting certain keywords. Second is ‘Index’, which is having the search engine index the content of the customer’s website one by one. Next is ‘Backlinks’, which mainly refers to how many other people’s website links point to the customer’s website.
Meanwhile, ‘User Experience’ is the time the user stays on the website, and ‘Uniqueness of Content’ is the deep and rich content, allowing content optimization. ‘E.A.T.’ or ‘Expertise, Authority and Trustworthy’ is also a factor to improve SEO, which is enabling experts to write content to increase authority and professionalism, while ‘Freshness of Content’ is writing up-to-date news.
Furthermore, the ‘Click-Through Rate’ is adding numbers or attractive words to the title, which will help the search engine, while ‘Website Speed’ is the time to load the website should be within 2-4 seconds. And lastly, ‘Responsive Design’, which allows users to easily browse the same website regardless of the computer, tablet, or mobile phone.
Five steps to gain a competitive edge in the race for student mindshare
As enrollment across higher education institutions continues to slow, many colleges and universities are painfully aware of the budget and funding cuts that can quickly follow. In an effort to stave off these downsizing exercises, the competition for new students has become fierce.
For the admissions and marketing departments tasked with driving enrollment and retention, the stakes have never been higher. And with the student and campus experience increasingly taking place online, schools understand the growing importance of the digital experience they deliver to both prospective and current students.
According to a study by higher ed enrollment and fundraising solutions, Ruffalo Noel Levitz (RNL), a college’s website ranks as the no.1 informational resource students use in their college search, while the same data showed that 76% of students will fill out a submission form on the school’s website to get more information.
Most marketing and admissions teams know they need to focus on enhancing their digital student experience; yet the biggest question is, “Where do we start?” With the sheer size and complexity of the typical college or university website and digital presence—not to mention the siloed nature of those contributing content—it can be daunting to figure out how to build a focused, high-impact digital strategy to drive enrollment and retention.
This 5-step guide explores how higher ed marketing and admissions teams can apply forward-thinking digital strategies to help siloed departments work in unison—and gain the buy-in they need from leadership—to drive enrollment and retention and support the success of their institutions.
1. Establish a benchmark for your digital marketing efforts
An effective digital strategy starts with taking inventory of your school’s current digital performance. After all, with budgets under pressure, marketing and admissions face increased scrutiny around the cost of digital tools and campaigns. Demonstrating need and proving results requires you to identify which metrics are the most important to drive buy-in from leadership.
Start by thinking about your digital marketing efforts and how they relate to the high-level ROI factors that leadership will use to assess them. These factors typically include:
•Volume •Quality •Value •Cost
From there, it becomes much easier to evaluate each of these factors across your institution’s digital presence—from webpages to SEO, paid campaigns, form submissions, and more.
Take note of poor performers
During this initial digital audit, make a list of the weakest links in your digital strategy. Is your content meeting student needs? Is your SEO strategy driving new prospective students to your website?
As you move into step two and begin to draft your digital strategy, these ‘poor performers’ can serve as a quick way to start delivering incremental progress through:
• Quick-win opportunities: Showing you where you can make small changes to drive fast, easy improvements to your digital student journey. • High-impact opportunities: Identifying the areas to apply limited resources in order to make the biggest impacts on key outcomes like site traffic, conversion applications, virtual tours, and more.
2. Align your digital strategy with your institution’s strategic goals
In addition to the inherent challenges associated with the numerous semi-independent schools, departments, and divisions, each silo in your institution’s ecosystem has slightly different objectives regarding its digital assets.
For example, some departments may have an internal application process to weed out students and keep class sizes down. These departments may need focused web content that delineates the application process, prerequisites, and other important preparation resources. Other departments, however, may suffer from a lack of awareness and need a stronger search and SEO presence to drum up student interest.
Despite these different sub-goals, every department’s objectives should still ladder up to your institution’s overarching strategic vision. Think of the way these two sets of objectives align as a sort of educational hub-and-spoke model. The departments represent the spokes, addressing their specific needs—but each one also connects to the university’s central strategy, keeping the wheel turning and your institution driving forward towards enrollment growth.
Start small—then scale up
After your initial website audit, you may find that there is a lot of work to be done. However, trying to tackle everything at once—across dozens and dozens of departments and divisions—is a surefire path to failure. Start with one gap, for example, that may be in terms of accessibility, SEO, and content, and then focus on that. As you demonstrate incremental ROI, you can build new initiatives into your digital strategy over time.
3. Create an inclusive digital student environment to match your inclusive campus
As digital solutions continue to replace many traditionally in-person student experiences, higher ed’s commitment to accessibility changes. Schools need to ensure their digital assets are truly accessible for all students and provide powerful opportunities to increase enrollment, engage students and support them on their path to graduation.
Without seamless accessibility to mission-critical webpages, initiatives in SEO and search won’t have the desired effect—making accessibility the perfect place to start your digital evolution.
Identifying accessibility issues
Bounce and abandon rates often serve as the ‘red flag’ that a specific webpage may not be meeting student UX expectations. But they also lead to as many questions as answers. So how do you turn these inaccessibility symptoms into a true diagnosis that includes actionable steps to cure UX issues?
To identify the underlying cause of accessibility and UX issues you may need to invest in tools that provide a deeper look at how users are interacting with a page. Behavioral analytics features like heat and scroll maps can empower marketing and admissions teams as they review user sessions and identify specific causes of user friction.
Armed with these insights, it becomes much easier to make the subtle adjustments that will enable more users to have meaningful interactions with your website—bringing them one step closer to enrolling in your institution, choosing a class, or declaring a major.
4. Improve SEO and optimize ad dollars with an empowered team
Most marketing and admissions teams know that SEO and paid search are valuable, but very few higher ed institutions have a real search strategy. Most schools fall into one of two buckets:
Set it and forget it
Many schools developed an SEO strategy back when they launched their website—when they had to write all the web copy, page titles and tags, and all the other stuff that feeds Google’s algorithms. They may have done a great job, but they’re not regularly evaluating and adjusting their search strategy.
Constant adjustment
Other schools regularly evaluate and adjust their search strategy. Sometimes too regularly. SEO is a long-term strategy—a bit like the stock market. You can’t judge performance based on a few days, or even a few weeks. Making constant, hasty adjustments is hardly better than having no search strategy at all.
The best approach falls between these two extremes. You want to build a search strategy that ladders up to the brand values and differentiators of your institution. Put tools in place that make it easy to monitor search performance. And if you’ve built a solid strategy, you’ll want to take a long-term perspective on judging and adjusting that strategy.
Identifying SEO champions across the institution
Before you start identifying keywords, make sure you have SEO champions across the schools and departments in your institution. These champions help you drive compliance with SEO strategy, ensuring that every web page is going through the same SEO lens.
Take a student-centric perspective to choose keywords
It’s likely that each school and department within your college or university will have its own set of unique keywords and key phrases. To help ensure keyword quality, it’s important to make sure they’re all starting from the same student-centric perspective:
• What questions are students asking? • What search terms are students using? • Where are students searching from?
Get everyone using the same tools
Picking a single, intuitive tool to use across all departments and schools will not only reduce administrative and IT burden, but it will also provide organization-wide visibility, and measurable progress toward your SEO goals.
5. Foster an identity that replicates the campus experience
With higher ed enrollment on the decline, it’s no surprise that most of the attention from marketing and admissions teams focuses on attracting and engaging prospective students. But student retention is equally critical to a school’s success.
Invest in your ‘digital campus’
Colleges and universities invest heavily in their physical campuses. But they should also be continually investing in the ‘digital campus’ to keep pace with expectations and drive satisfaction among the student body.
Deliver a mobile-optimized experience
Students today expect to pull out their smartphones to get an answer or complete just about any task. Make sure your students are able to access the digital assets—course materials, campus information, and other resources—they want from their mobile device. Moreover, make sure that your digital experience is just as great on a mobile device as it is on a desktop or laptop.
Give students real-time connections
We live in a world defined by instant gratification. Fair or not, students bring the same expectations to the ‘digital campus’. When they want help or need an answer, they want to connect with someone right now—and frustration mounts with every passing minute. Integrating chat boxes and other real-time communication tools make it easy, fast, and intuitive for students to connect with professors and admin to get the support they need, right when they need it.
Keep marketing conversational
Today’s higher ed students see right through ‘marketing speak’. Yet marketing teams must still reach out to engage students with offers—whether it’s course enrollment information, campus events, and opportunities, or other services. The key is to make sure your marketing communications use friendly, casual language. Messages should feel like they’re coming from a helpful peer—not a lecturing parent, and definitely not a salesperson. Think of your tone and language like the landscaping and other aesthetic features of your physical campus: They have a big impact on the ‘feel’ and experience of your digital campus.
Figuring out where to start (or where to focus) can be the toughest part of improving your college or university’s digital presence. But by following the actionable steps offered in this guide, you can begin building a high-impact, forward-thinking digital strategy that’s geared toward the outcomes that matter most: driving enrollment and protecting student retention. Just as importantly, these achievable strategies will help you realize measurable results and build powerful momentum behind your digital initiatives.
Join us as we bring you an in-depth webinar on how you can improve online strategies, one that’s able to deliver a seamless and intelligent digital experience that would effectively accelerate student recruitment efforts as well as improve student retention. Register here.
Singapore – Digital marketing agency Honour Media has launched an expansion to its content marketing service called ‘Done-for-you (DFY) Content Marketing Service’, this time catered for local businesses, startups, and e-commerce merchants.
The newly updated service is part of their commitment to helping ambitious yet time-poor business owners to maximize their reach, acquire a consistent pipeline of leads, and eventually increase sales. Through the service, Honour Media aims to help business owners achieve their revenue and growth goals such as getting more organic traffic from search engines, reaching more local customers, or making more sales.
Some of the services include in-house research, content outline, pro-grade articles, authority publication pieces, webinar creation, and design to reach a wider audience and building brand awareness.
Alongside tailored content marketing services, their other signature services include Facebook, YouTube Ads, and Messenger Marketing that form part of their three-pronged approach which turns content and conversations into sales.
Honour Media’s service responds to the challenge of businesses in acquiring leads. The company noted that there is more competition than ever in most niches, and staying on top of Google’s changing algorithms can be difficult. Content marketing has become one of the most effective and organic ways for startups and e-commerce businesses to acquire new customers, said the company.
“Honour Media is the new-age digital marketing agency that helps ambitious business owners to create, market, and distribute the right content at the right time to the right audience. In order to thrive in the new normal, we have to stop looking back and be open to adopting new ways to supercharge marketing efforts without paying a dime for paid ads. With our new service, we can now help ambitious, driven and smart business owners distribute more content that pays them back with organic leads, customers, and sales,” said Sherlene Lian, owner of Honour Media.
With marketing budgets being cut because of the coronavirus pandemic and an uptick in consumers shifting to online purchases, SEO – a cost-effective, long-term results method of getting your message, products, and services out there – matters more than ever.
But if you think traffic is all your SEO strategy should deliver, then you’re underutilizing it. Set up correctly, SEO can become your most efficient digital marketing channel in 2021. It can be leveraged to achieve your most important business goals, including increased revenue, improved brand sentiment, a bigger market share, and higher marketing ROI.
Working in healthcare? Financial services? Manufacturing? Don’t click away just yet. SEO is no longer just for big-name retailers. For organizations in digitally-immature sectors, SEO can help them stand out and move into the lead via a greater digital reach, improved brand perception, and more highly-qualified leads. Even if your organization is not investing in its discoverability online, you can bet your competitors will be. And with the average click rate for the top position on Google getting nearly 30% of all clicks, this is not a race you can afford to lose.
In short, 2021 is the year that SEO should be on everyone’s agenda. Read on to discover how to prepare for SEO success in 2021.
1. SEO requires a more holistic approach
Many organizations are waking up to the fact that when it comes to their SEO strategy, not everyone is on the same page. The key point of contention? Who in the organization actually owns this business-critical function. Some elements are managed by the IT department, some by web teams, while other parts fall under marketing’s remit.
Global enterprises with dispersed workforces are most at risk, but even smaller organizations can fall into this trap. For example, a member of the marketing team might identify a good SEO opportunity for their organization’s website but be unable to implement it because responsibility for SEO lies with the web development team. An analytics expert might spot some intriguing content gaps that your organization could plug and reap the traffic rewards from, but be unable to draft compelling, high-quality content for that purpose without help from the content team. Especially in larger organizations, it’s generally not as simple as shooting across a quick email to get an update made.
It’s clear that coming out of 2020, many organizations are still struggling to unite key SEO stakeholders behind an organic search strategy that positively impacts wider business outcomes. With so many players – and siloes – involved, SEO strategies risk becoming confused, resource-intensive, and at worst, ineffective.
What you need to do ahead of 2021. This siloed approach to SEO will never deliver the results your organization needs. Rather than an unorganized mix of employees who occasionally optimize your site for certain SEO elements – perhaps on an ad hoc basis – a proactive, cross-functional SEO team with clear SEO roles, responsibilities, and processes must be carved out. The more closely key SEO stakeholders work together, the more likely it is they will have the information and resources they need to run a highly-effective SEO strategy.
Start by identifying who should be part of your cross-functional team. This list should include anyone who works with your website in a way that influences or impacts SEO. Though this list will look different for every organization it might include:
SEO specialists
PPC specialists
Content writers and strategists
Marketers
Web developers
Analytics specialists
Sales
IT
PR
If your organization outsources its marketing or SEO efforts, you should also list any external vendors you’re using.
Tip: Transparency, clear task allocation, and status updates are essential for any SEO strategy to succeed. Invite all your key stakeholders to use real-time project management software or a specialized SEO dashboard to effortlessly stay on top of what’s completed, what still needs to be done, by who, and when.
Once you have defined your 2021 SEO taskforce, it’s time to get them all on the same page and working towards your broader business goals. Which brings us to trend number two.
2. SEO reporting needs to prove ROI
It’s not enough to claim that organic search ‘drives traffic’ to your website anymore – SEO cannot operate separately from your business goals. To prove that SEO positively impacts your bottom line and get C-level buy-in and funding for your organic search initiatives (especially in a time when marketing budgets are under scrutiny), you organization needs to definitively link SEO to producing a competitive advantage online.
The best way to do this is with data. Organizations need access to robust SEO reporting to make their case, especially when it comes to presenting organic search performance to the C-suite. While they may not have time to dive into the minutiae of every SEO campaign, it’s vital that decision makers are able to quickly and easily understand how the company’s SEO strategy impacts top-line company targets: revenue, brand recognition, and share of voice. With organizations regularly relying on multiple tools, including web analytics platforms, content optimization tools, keyword finders, broken link crawlers, and so on – with diverging and complex data – to report on their SEO activity, it can be challenging for decision makers to get a clear, cohesive picture of how SEO delivers more than just extra clicks.
“It’s very common that the CMOs we speak to get SEO reports that have traffic increases, position increases, and that have click-through rate improvement, which are all great metrics for marketers, but it doesn’t speak to the bottom line or how it’s impacting goals for their business,” says Diane Kulseth, Senior SEO Consultant at Siteimprove.
What you need to do ahead of 2021. SEO stakeholders across an organization should prioritize working with a ‘single source of truth’ to move their SEO campaigns forward with confidence. That typically means working from a single, comprehensive SEO platform. Platforms built around the specific needs of enterprise organizations, like Siteimprove SEO, are useful for keeping track of all the moving parts of your SEO strategy across disparate teams – but that’s not all. Their intuitive dashboard overviews and metrics also help decision makers to effortlessly connect the SEO dots between content, traffic, and ROI.
3. The user experience is about to matter a lot more
Anyone who works with websites know that Google and other search engines constantly review and revise the algorithms that determine search engine result pages rankings. In 2021, this will reach a whole new level with the rolling out of Google’s new user-centric Core Web Vitals.
This algorithm change will officially make the user experience a major ranking signal for websites. Normally, it only provides limited transparency into how its algorithms operate, but in this case, Google has published extensive new guidance on how to measure page experience from the user’s perspective, including a supporting set of metrics that can be used to benchmark websites.
What you need to do ahead of 2021. Organizations need to prepare for this change now by evaluating their existing page performance and making the adjustments required for their content to rank according to the new algorithm. Luckily, good SEO and a positive user experience tend to go hand-in-hand. Examples of the intersectionality between SEO and the user experience include:
Fast page-loading times
Mobile-friendly content
Providing a secure visitor page experience
Improving web page usability
4. PPC and SEO must work together
While marketing and advertising spend is shrinking in the current environment – a trend that is likely to continue into 2021, organic search remains a cost-effective way to fill the gap. After all, you don’t need to pay every time someone clicks on your organic content, but you do pay for clicks with PPC – and depending on your chosen keywords, that can be costly. The moment you stop paying for ads, your traffic will dry up, whereas the benefits of well-ranking organic search results can last for years. Even more persuasively, good SEO can actually improve your PPC results – helping you get more value out of your paid search campaigns by identifying and eliminating inefficiencies and wasted spend. Let’s find out how.
Tip: SEO results can be harder to quantify than those from PPC and undoubtedly take longer to show ROI. So, it’s important that your SEO and paid search teams work together closely to produce a mix of quick search wins and long-term results. This should be straightforward if you’ve assigned roles and responsibilities across a cross-functional SEO team as described in step one.
What you need to do ahead of 2021. Repurpose the data from your existing PPC and SEO campaigns to plug the budget gaps in your paid search strategy. If you have a keyphrase that’s performing particularly well in a PPC campaign, you should consider using that same keyphrase in your SEO campaign to try to dominate the organic search results as well. This is a good way of growing brand awareness and trust, since users will see your brand twice in their search results. If they don’t click on your ads, the presence of your brand name at the top of the search results page will help position your organization top-of-mind.
When your search strategy is suffering from keyword overlaps, for instance, when you’ve allocated PPC spend to phrases where you’re already ranking well organically, it makes sense to lessen your spend in that area and redistribute your budget, ideally to areas where your organic search campaigns are performing poorly. This approach is even more compelling when you know that organic desktop listings still produce 20 x more clicks than PPC ads.
Enterprise SEO tools help you organize for success
As much as SEO is increasingly indispensable, it’s set to become even more challenging for organizations to execute successfully. In 2021, SEO teams will be expected to create larger numbers of high-quality content, keep up with search engine algorithm changes, conduct keyword research, perform technical site audits, and present clear evidence of ROI for their SEO campaigns – not to mention managing day-to-day SEO tasks – all on an even tighter budget with fewer resources, to socially-distanced, dispersed stakeholders. It’s going to be a really tough job.
Fortunately, there’s a simpler way to automate workflows, unite stakeholders, and prepare your organization for SEO success in 2021: investing in an enterprise SEO tool. Whether your organization manages its SEO in-house or partners with an agency, using an enterprise SEO solution will help you get more from your SEO campaigns by adding helpful automation, insights, and reporting capabilities into the mix. Remember, whatever initial investment an SEO tool requires in terms of budget and onboarding, it will swiftly make up for in productivity gains. According to Forrester’s ROI of SEO report, marketers that adopt an SEO platform report an average reduction of 28 hours per month spent on key SEO tasks. That’s 28 hours that can be better spent on formulating more successful SEO plans! Yet further research reveals that just one in three organizations are currently using one.
The author is Georgia James, content writer for Siteimprove. Siteimprove is a SaaS solution that helps organizations achieve their digital potential by empowering teams with actionable insights to deliver a superior website experience and drive growth.
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